Latest Contact Center Best Practices

Deloitte recently released the findings of its 2015 Global Contact Center Survey, revealing a number of key insights regarding the future of communications and contact centers as it relates to both business operations and consumer preferences. Check-out the most significant results, and what businesses and contact centers should take away from them.

As technology becomes more affordable and customer expectations continue to rapidly evolve, there has been a noticeable shift within organizations as it relates to departmental technology spend. A role once assigned to CIOs and IT personnel, a group focused primarily on critical operational requirements, the responsibility of purchasing and maintaining the latest technology has fallen into the lap of those who play a more integral role in the customer experience—“the business”. Who exactly is “the business” comprised of? Middle management, i.e. contact center directors, marketing and sales executives, VPs, and customer service managers, to name a few. Forrester Research Group reports that 70% of technology spending in North American companies of more than 250 employees is either “business” led, or heavily influenced by “business”, a number that has grown significantly in recent years. And 50% of business managers, directors, and vice presidents are increasing their departmental budgets on technology products and services over the next 12 months.

As consumer demands and expectations continue to rapidly evolve, many businesses have turned to advanced software-as-a-service solutions (CRM, Ticketing, WFM, WFO, Telephony) to assist in the daily management of their client relationships and potential prospects. But while individually beneficial as stand alone solutions, many enterprise businesses are still finding it difficult to satisfy the expectations of their respective consumers. Why? Because SaaS solutions are not the answer –integrated solutions are.

Today technology is at the center of any discussion regarding competitive advantage, sustainability, and growth. As it specifically relates to the contact center space, the ability to deliver and communicate with customers using the latest channels has never been more important.And yet, despite the emphasis on offering the latest in customer communications, the vast majority of businesses are still basing their service delivery on old, inflexible, and costly premise-based solutions. Which begs the very obvious question, why?

For one, while there is no denying that smartphones and the age of social media are quickly transforming the communication landscape, the tried and tested concept of calling-in is still not dead. In fact, 73% of customers still prefer to speak to a representative, which is far greater than those choosing to use Twitter to communicate at 22% (Forrester). And this shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider the generational breakdown of today’s customers, from Baby Boomers (79 Million), to Generation X (52 Million), to Generation Y (75 Million), to Generation Z (Still growing); with every one listing the phone as a primary means of contact except for the last. So, yes, premise-based solutions are surviving by virtue of those generations, but the trend is quickly moving towards email, social, media, and web, so keeping to the old way of things may not be the wisest of strategies. At the very least, it will not support any long-term competitive advantage your company may otherwise have.

Technologies follow interesting twists and turns along the adoption curve. It often proves most of the experts wrong, if not relative to how it gets adopted, certainly relative to the timing of its adoption.

Take WebRTC for example. The telecom industry has been talking about the technology for a number of years and a number of vendors have illustrated interesting use cases that leverage its benefits. And yet today, the only places where we find its actual use are in residential applications like Google’s ChromeCast. With the introduction of the "Mayday" button on their high-end tablets, Amazon made some waves in the WebRTC andcontact center worlds, but it is unclear how many people actually use this capability to call Amazon. So even though it solves a number of business problems and helps carriers introduce new services that help them compete more effectively, the technology is still stuck in the demo phase as far as productive business applications are concerned.